Alexander Tristan Riley, Godless Intellectuals: The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The title of this engaging work might seem paradoxical, but while the intellectuals it describes may have been godless, they were deeply concerned with some of the central issues addressed by religion.In explaining how, Riley gives us an historical sociology of a stream of Durkheim-influenced thinking that has only recently gained recognition, and indeed, is still ignored in certain quarters.His Durkheim is one whose approach, ideas and preoccupations, mediated through the French cultural avant-garde, neglected, and reappropriated in various ways, had a formative influence on French poststructuralist thought, and thence on the wider world of letters.What he terms "mystic Durkheimianism," elements of which mark The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and permeate the work of Robert Hertz and Marcel Mauss, contradicts the reflex association of Durkheimian thought with conservatism, functionalism, and scientism.Riley taps into an accumulating literature on the historical development of Durkheimian sociology, and a growing interest in how Durkheimian (or even Comtean) elements leaven the work of figures such as Althusser, Foucault, or Bourdieu, even if they are not always acknowledged there.However, Riley is not interested in simply replacing Durkheim the Father of Functionalism with Durkheim the Father of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, or Derrida.He attempts something quite different from tracing ur-sources: a cultural sociology of the transmission and reconfiguration of ideas and of modes of intellectual formation, using unpublished sources, correspondence and personal papers, alongside published texts.In doing so, he seeks to navigate between two kinds of reductionism.Strictly textual interpretation has its uses, but it risks reducing authors to texts, treating texts as agents, and rendering the terrain of agency as an abstract concatenation of ideas.On the other hand, "situating" authors (and their texts) in terms of class, political or other interests can illuminate intellectual politics but can also yield caricatures, like the cartoon "Durkheim" still inhabiting some undergraduate texts.Riley seeks what these approaches can miss: how the formation and diffraction of
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".